Printing Microsoft Office Documents

If you use images in your Word documents or PowerPoint slides it is highly likely that they are quite large and of a high quality. Microsoft Office stores the full high quality image even though you may have reduced the size, or cropped it after it has been inserted.

To overcome this and make the presentation smaller to print it is essential that the images are compressed.

Resizing an Image

Images can be resized quickly and easily from within the Microsoft Office environment.

Click the image that you want to change the size for

Do one of the following:

To change the width: drag one of the side centre handles to the left or right

To change the height: drag either the top or bottom centre handle up or down

To scale the image: drag a corner handle inward or outward

Cropping an Image

Cropping a picture reduces it's size by removing either the vertical and/or horizontal edges. This is often used to hide or trim a part of the image, either for emphasis or to remove unwanted portions.

You can crop any image, except an animated GIF, by:

Select the image that you want to crop

Under Picture Tools, on the Format tab, in the Size group, click Crop

Do one of the following:

To crop one side: drag the centre cropping handle on that side inward

To crop equally on two sides: press and hold the CTRL button while you drag the centre cropping handle on either side inward

To crop equally on all four sides: press and hold the CTRL button while you drag a corner cropping handle inward

Compressing an Image

To compress an image:

Select the image that you want to compress

Under Picture Tools, on the Format tab, in the Adjust group, click Compress Pictures

To compress the selected picture only and not all of the pictures in the document, select the Apply to selected pictures only check box

NOTE: The Automatically perform basic compression on save option applies only to the document that is open in the current program. All of the other options in the Compression Settings dialog box apply to all documents in Office Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and Word 2010.